Psychology

Prior research has examined social anxiety, emotional competence (EC) and life adjustment (i.e., loneliness and life satisfaction) using cross-sectional designs, although there is limited information on their association over time. The present study examined the impact of social anxiety on life adjustment and assessed if EC could mediate this relationship from young to middle adulthood. University students (N = 283) completed self-report measures at two time points: in first year university and 15 years later. The results accord with previous research demonstrating the stability and slight decrease of social anxiety over time. Social anxiety in young adulthood was a robust predictor of loneliness in middle adulthood, and a weak predictor of life dissatisfaction for men. Mediation analyses revealed that social anxiety was indirectly associated with interpersonal adjustment via EC, especially the intrapersonal EC domain. Social anxiety requires early intervention and EC may help to prevent later social anxiety and maladjustment.

Author Keywords: emotional intelligence, life adjustment, social anxiety

The Continuity Hypothesis states that dreams reflect waking day cognition and experiences, which reflect one's mental health status. As such, dreams are, by extension, cognitions that occur during sleep. To date, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is deemed the most efficacious method of social anxiety treatment by working with cognitions. The current study utilized both CBT and The Storytelling Method (TSM) of dream interpretation, whose methodology is based on CBT; CBT works with waking cognitions and TSM works with sleep cognition. This study examined the effectiveness in decreasing social anxiety symptoms with TSM and comparing its efficacy to a traditional CBT technique. Undergraduate psychology students (N = 36) completed a daily journal of either the TSM or CBT format for two weeks. Participants completed self-report measures of social anxiety, state-anxiety, and depression before and after practicing either method. TSM did not significantly decrease levels of social anxiety, state-anxiety, or depression, whereas CBT significantly decreased only social anxiety levels. Dream content reflecting waking day anxiety and depression did not decrease over time, coinciding with the findings that students did not experience a decrease in their waking day life, supporting the Continuity Hypothesis. Findings suggest anxiety and depression to be very stable in this sample. Future research should explore interventions that are clinician-guided, in a group setting, or, occur over a longer period of time.

Author Keywords: Content Analysis, Social anxiety, The Storytelling Method

While preferences for symmetry are seemingly universal, they can be seen at their most extreme among individuals high in trait incompleteness. As yet, it is unclear why incompleteness yields heightened symmetry preferences. Summerfeldt et al. (2015) speculated that individuals high in incompleteness may develop heightened preferences for symmetry due to its greater perceptual fluency. Accordingly, the aim of the present set of three experiments was to examine this relationship. Implicit preferences for symmetry were measured using a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) reported by Makin et al. (2012). Experiments 1 (N = 24) and 2 (N = 24) examined whether the general implicit preferences for symmetry and influence of perceptual fluency reported by Makin et al. (2012) extended to a within-subjects design. Experiment 3 (N = 86) examined whether trait incompleteness is related to greater implicit preferences for symmetric stimuli, and whether perceptual fluency affects this association. Results showed that incompleteness and implicit preferences were related, and that incompleteness-related differences in preferences were eliminated when the patterns were equally perceptually fluent, supporting the idea that incompleteness-related preferences for symmetry are linked to perceptual fluency. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Temporal lobe epilepsy increases risk for developing major depression, and conversely, depression increases risk for development of epilepsy. The mechanisms responsible for the widely observed bi-directional relationship between epilepsy and depression are currently poorly understood. One reason why our understanding of shared etiology has had little improvement is due to the lack of availability of a reliable animal model for inducing depression in epileptic animals. The development of a reliable model of epilepsy-depression comorbidity would greatly improve the ability to mechanistically evaluate shared pathophysiology between the conditions. Recently there has been evidence that rapid kindling of the basolateral amygdala can evoke a behavioural phenotype that is comparable to the symptoms of anxiety and depression observed in depressed epileptic patients. However, this work has yet to be replicated, leaving question as to whether or not the behavioural phenotype can be reliably evoked. In the following series of experiments we assessed rapid amygdala kindling as a potential model of epilepsy-depression comorbidity and sought to improve the model with inclusion of the glucocorticoid corticosterone. Our findings may improve our understanding of the unique relationships between epilepsy and depression.

Author Keywords: animal models, depression, hippocampus, kindling, stress, temporal lobe epilepsy

Ill-structured problems have changing components that solvers need to adapt their solutions to. Well-structured problems have strict, well-defined procedures, and solvers must know which procedures to apply and when. Research has suggested that these two types of problems utilize different problem-solving skills. The current study focused on the relation between ill-structured interpersonal problem solving, novel well-structured problem-solving, and cognitive flexibility in young adults and older adolescents. It was predicted that because of the changing components of ill-structured problems, cognitive flexibility would more strongly predict these compared to well-structured problems. The current study sample consisted of 73 undergraduates with an average age of 20.43 years. The results showed that cognitive flexibility is equally associated with ill-structured problem-solving and well-structured problem-solving. This suggests that cognitive flexibility may support the perspective coordination involved in solving ill-structured problems and that cognitive flexibility may support switching between search strategies when solving a novel well-structured problem.

Author Keywords: adolescent, adult, cognitive flexibility, ill-structured problem-solving, novel problems, well-structured problem-solving

For currently-debated reasons, perception of visual stimuli is enhanced in near-hand space compared to far-hand space. According to the action potentiation hypothesis, near-hand effects result from automatically generated potential motor responses produced upon viewing objects presented in near-hand space. This hypothesis was tested by crossing hand manipulations with two separate techniques designed to elicit action potentiation. The first series of experiments presented participants with a cueing task where images of handled objects served as the cue, and its handle compatibility was manipulated. A consistent near-hand effect was observed, but there was no evidence that the images potentiated action as there was no handle-compatibility effect. The second experiment used a visuomotor competition reaching task, which required participants to initiate reaches toward a distractor display and adjust their trajectory on the fly so as to end the reach at a later indicated target location. For every distractor presented simultaneous and competing motor responses were generated, and differences in how hand presence influenced the resolution of this competition were examined. Based on predictions made, action potentiation is unlikely to be the root cause of the near-hand effect; however, was not possible to rule out this explanation entirely. The findings of these experiments shed light both on the importance and consistency of the near-hand effect, and the difficulties associated with uncovering its nature in human populations.

Social anxiety often co-occurs with substance use disorders – various psychological variables, contextual factors, and implicit cognitions may help explain their relationship. This thesis examined whether social anxiety and psychological variables (jointly and independently) helped predict substance use and related problems. It also explored whether social anxiety group membership helped predict implicit cannabis-sedation associations and substance use desirability. A sample of undergraduate student volunteers (N = 65) completed a computer task, questionnaires with anxiety-provoking vignettes, and online questionnaires. Results indicate that fear of negative evaluation and anxiety sensitivity are important predictors of alcohol and cannabis (respectively) use and problems. Social anxiety group was related to increased cannabis desirability in performance contexts. No significant implicit cannabis-sedation associations were identified. Our findings highlight the importance of certain variables in social anxiety and substance use relationships, and considering contextual factors when assessing substance desirability. It also provides preliminary evidence of a novel implicit cannabis-sedation measure.

Author Keywords: Coping, Emotion, Implicit Cognition, Social Anxiety, Substance Use

Self-regulation skills have been connected to positive school success and increased academic achievement (McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2006). One recently explored method to aid students in their ability to self-regulate is physical activity (Becker, et al., 2011). The purpose of this study was to explore the facilitation of self- regulation through physical activity via access to an exercise bicycle within an elementary and secondary school setting. Student bicycle usage was explored via student documentation to determine frequency and duration of use. Teacher observations were collected via email correspondence were analyzed via thematic content analysis and reflections made by the teachers at a follow-up debriefing session were summarized. Overall, a novelty effect was apparent with the bicycle, where it was used extensively in the first month of the study and then use sharply declined thereafter. Teachers felt that the bicycle appeared to provide some students with support, however there were challenges with integrating the exercise bicycle into the classroom. As well, teachers stated that factors such as bicycle placement and engagement levels must be explored further in order to understand the impact an exercise bicycle could possibly have on a student's ability to self-regulate.

Author Keywords: exercise bicycle, physical activity, self-regulation

This research explores key themes emerging from the question of the meaning Anishinaabe individuals attach to utilizing traditional practices and ceremonies to address their own trauma. The contributors share their stories, which are deeply rooted in relationships. The methodology of this research is also rooted within an Indigenous paradigm; storytelling is a core feature of relationships and knowledge transmission through its ability to weave together and across generations. Indigenous cultures have had a long history of both verbal and visual storytelling, in the forms of pictographs and petroglyphs, wampum belts, bead and quill work, and so on. While stories are often entertaining, they are at their core, the most human of activities. Anishinaabe approaches to ceremony, spirit and the sacred are woven into the language, attitudes and practices that people still engage in, despite the depredations of colonization. The findings of this research explore how identity, found through love, caring, self-awareness, and the (re)claiming of wellness and wholeness, permeates the stories of healing and is rooted in ceremonies. This is relationship with self and self-in-relation to all things: niwiikaniginaa. Land-as-home, culture, family, and love ground people in their sense of self and wellness. Language and thought emerge from the land, the source of well-being or mino bimaadsiwin in the most profound ways. It is through home – land, family, culture, spiritual connection – that healing occurs in ways that cannot be found in clinical systems.

Author Keywords: Colonization, First Nations, Healing, Identity, Storytelling, Trauma

Aging is associated with a multitude of changes, including changes in the motor system. One such change that has been documented is increased levels of inherent movement variability (the inability to consistently replicate movements over time) with increasing age. Previous research has had controversial findings regarding the effect that movement variability has on motor learning and motor adaptation. Some research suggests that movement variability is beneficial to motor learning, while other research indicates that movement variability is the by-product of a noisy motor system and is a detriment to learning new skills. How do changes in movement variability associated with aging affect the ability to adapt to a mass perturbation? We tested younger and older individuals on a mass adaptation task (applying mass to the lateral side of the arm to perturb inertial forces of the limb during reaches). We analyzed baseline levels of movement variability, learning during the adaptation block and how baseline levels of movement variability explained differences in learning. We focused on measures of accuracy, speed and precision. We found that younger individuals displayed greater levels of movement variability throughout the experiment and that they also learned to adapt to the mass perturbation more successfully than their older counterparts. Multi-joint movements displayed greater degrees of learning in comparison to single-joint movements, likely due to the difference in difficulty when completing the two movements. Taken together, our results suggest that purposeful movement variability may be beneficial to motor adaptation.

Author Keywords: aging, mass adaptation, motor adaptation, motor learning, movement variability